


That's Entertainment

by romans



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Character Death, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-03
Updated: 2014-06-17
Packaged: 2017-12-17 15:02:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/868889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/romans/pseuds/romans
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Will is a little bit of a survivalist, and Hannibal finds out that being a serial killer during a zombie apocalypse is harder than you'd think. (Future!fic, mildly AU) (Updated 6/17)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Beta'd by dreamofflight, ficken_sie_bitte, with firearms advice provided by six_dollar_baby and the experts at little details. Any mistakes are my own. Spoilers through S1 of Hannibal.
> 
> [Author's note: I was in a weird, angry headspace when I wrote this. The ending isn't to everyone's taste. Character death in the last chapter, heads up.]

Everything Will Graham knows about the so-called "zombie apocalypse", he learned from the _The Washington Post_. That stops coming a few weeks after the increasingly lurid headlines first appear. The roads get busier, snarled with traffic from dawn to dusk and through the night, and then everything falls into an eerie silence. The planes stop flying overhead. He hadn't noticed the constant background hum of civilization, before. Military choppers go by sometimes, broadcasting their presence for miles around, unnaturally loud in the even stranger silence. 

Even when he goes into Fairfax for dog food, it looks more like a recession has hit, or a hurricane, than the end of the world. There are no corpses in the streets, no animated dead stumbling down the roads. It's just deathly quiet. The traffic lights are blinking on and off. Faces look out of the few windows that aren't boarded up when he goes by, but other than that there's almost nothing. Someone takes a shot at him from a roof, speeding him down the road with a new dent in his car. 

He can't stop thinking about New Orleans, after Katrina, and the miles and miles of wrecked coastline where he had spent his childhood. He had never particularly planned on going back, but it was still surprisingly painful to see. Fairfax rubs at the raw edges of that wound, standing empty and still. 

He stops at a Petco first, and loads his trunk with as many bags of dog food as he can find. As an afterthought, he takes flea treatment kits, too, and a handful of extra leashes and collars. A few people have beaten him to the store, but it's mostly untouched. When he pulls up in front of the REI, he can see right away that it hasn't been so fortunate. The display windows have been bashed in, and when he ventures inside, gun in hand, the shelves and racks are bare. Someone has taken the canoes. He wonders what they were thinking. 

There's nothing useful left. He goes back to his car and goes to the store, which has also been ransacked. There's some canned food left, though, and a tub of lentils that no one could move. He fills as many bags as he can and takes them out to the car, and goes back for onions and a barrel of apples. The bananas are brown and fly-blown, and the stench from the meat section would make him gag if he hadn't smelled it a thousand times before. At least he knows what will keep. There are still some seed packets left on the little stand by the checkout; he takes those, too. 

There's a government flyer sticking out of the register: aid packets will be dropped twice a week. Will pockets it and goes home to his dogs. 

Abigail shows up on his doorstep the next morning. 

 

It hadn't started on the east coast, or even in America, but it had ended there. The first reports came from Russia, and then, alarmingly quickly, from the west coast. No one knew what it was: they called it an infection, or the end of the world. The undead, the walking dead, the infected, are everywhere. Everyone has a different name for them. It's like the entire world is trapped in a horrific fever dream. 

Will Graham, hidden away in his farmhouse in the woods with his daughter (it's a horrible word, he knows- and yet it's the only term he can think of when it comes to Abigail) and his dogs, doesn't need to run and hide. He just retreats even further, and stocks up on guns and food and ammunition, and battens down the hatches around his lonely life. 

The house is quiet, most days, just Will and Abigail and the dogs alone with their huge stock of canned food. There's a vegetable garden that Alana had helped him to plant, once neglected and now lovingly nurtured. Abigail goes out sometimes with her rifle and brings back rabbits and birds to break the monotony of mealtime. Abigail tells him that his beard makes him look like a mountain man, but he can't see the point in shaving. They're alone. The dead don't come out this far, despite the fact that the suburbs are only a few miles away. He hasn't heard anything from his neighbors. They could be holed up like him. They could be dead. He's not sure he wants to know. 

Either way, they haven't come knocking, and that's the important part.

 

Will wakes up one day to find the dogs huddled around his bed, hackles up and teeth bared. They won't leave the bedroom or calm down, so he grabs his gun and goes to see what's frightening them. 

The front door is open. 

He edges out onto the porch, not sure what to expect, and finds Abigail staring down the barrel of the rifle at a dead man. The man looks like one of the corpses from the lab, grey-skinned, dotted with bruises, eyes slowly rotting in his head. Abigail looks back at Will, asking permission, and he nods. 

It takes three bullets before the dead man goes down. The sound seems to reverberate across the empty landscape, cracking in the morning air. 

Will stares at the corpse for a long time, trying to reconcile the dead thing in front of him with the creature that had been in his yard moments earlier. 

"Abigail," he asks. "Did you go through Baltimore on your way here?" 

She pauses in the doorway and looks back at him. Her expression is guarded. 

"Yeah, I hitched from Pittsburgh," she says. 

"How was it?" Will asks. 

Abigail bites her lip. "Bad. Really bad." 

Will is staring at the dead body on his lawn. If the police have given up on Baltimore- 

" _Fuck,_ " Will says. The expletive lingers in the air like the crack of the rifle, and Abigail is looking at him curiously now. 

"Hannibal," he says. "He's still in the hospital."

"Or he's free," Abigail says. Will had considered that, in one horrified moment of remembering, and he's honestly not sure which is worse: the idea of Hannibal locked inside an asylum and left to his own defenses while the dead are rising, or the idea of Hannibal on the loose, free to come calling whenever he pleases. Now that he knows-

"Fuck," Will says again, to himself. The dogs have come out of his bedroom and are sniffing the body outside, except for the little one, which is sitting patiently at his feet. He picks her up absently and goes back to his bedroom. They're due for another food run anyways, and he has enough gasoline to get to Baltimore and back. When he gets dressed he notices that he's thrown extra clothes on the bed: socks, an old flannel shirt, a ragged pair of jeans that he never wears.

"I can stay," Abigail says, when he comes out with his travel bag and his hiking pack. He looks at her, sitting at his kitchen table with a scarf around her neck (Will wonders who she needs to hide from, now, and sometimes he suspects it's him), hands busy sharpening her hunting knife. She's still so young. He imagines leaving her here for a day, maybe even a week, imagines the dead coming to his house, or the living looking for shelter. Imagines her on her own.

It frightens him, in more than one way. 

"No," he says, hefting another pack. "You're coming with me." 

 

+

 

At first glance the grounds are deserted, but Will keeps his eyes open nonetheless. He's learned to be cautious in urban areas and big buildings, and this one will need special care. The living are just as dangerous as the dead. Abigail pauses behind him, taking in the oppressive gloom of the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. 

"Are we sure he's still there?" she asks. 

"I hope not," Will says. "Shoot anything that's not him." 

"What if he's..." Abigail lets the sentence end unfinished, and Will shudders at the thought. Hannibal as a zombie would be a twisted parody of himself, consuming human flesh in a mindless haze of need. No elegance; none of that stunning _intelligence_ that had let him wrap Will around his little finger. 

Even from a locked cell and across state lines, Hannibal managed to twist the knife. 

And now Will was coming to _rescue_ him.

"Stay here," he tells Abigail. Whatever he finds in there is nothing that she should see.

The prison is quiet when he goes inside, empty but for his own echoing footsteps on the tiled floors. There's an orderly lying face down on the floor in the foyer, and he doesn't stir when Will approaches him. He's bloated with decomposition and heat, and there's a pool of blood and other fluids slicking the floor beneath him. Will grimaces. He's seen worse, but the obvious bite marks where chunks have been torn out, the mindless _predation_ , frightens him on a primal level. This is nothing like the all-too-human murderers he chased before. 

Will flips the man over and unclips his security pass from his belt. He doesn't look at the corpse's face; doesn't stop to see if it's whole or not. Can't look. Not any more. In the end, he only needs the card for the last door. The others have been torn out of their frames.

When he swipes the card at the final door and punches in his guest code, it slides open for him soundlessly. 

The first thing that hits him when he goes down into Hannibal's cell block is the stench of death. He finds the source very quickly: the cells are still closed, and the inmates have starved to death. One man is sitting against the wall of his cell, staring dully at Will. 

There's another man lying on the floor at the end of the hall, whimpering softly to himself. Will can only see his back at first, but he can tell that the man is propped oddly against the glass, like his arms have been dislocated. The floor beneath him is stained with blood. 

When Will comes closer, pointedly keeping his gaze away from the bodies in the cells, the man twists around to look at him. It's Frederick Chilton. His eyes are glazed and he doesn't seem to be lucid, and he's still holding his left arm above his head. 

"Doctor Chilton?" Will crouches down beside him and his stomach flips when he sees that Chilton's left arm has been handcuffed to the bars of Hannibal's cell. Both of his shoulders have been dislocated, and his right arm ends- it just ends. Bare bone protrudes from a bandage that has been carefully wrapped around the end of Chilton's bicep. Will jerks backward as Chilton lurches forward and then falls back against the glass of Hannibal's cell. 

When Will looks up, Hannibal is standing above him, blood-spattered and bright-eyed. His hands are resting on the bars of his cell, and there's only a thin pane of glass and Chilton's twitching form separating them. 

"You _cut off his hand_ ," Will snaps. He can't remember what compelled him to come here. The world spins a little, and he reels back against the wall, groping for his gun. 

"I flayed him," Hannibal says, reprovingly. "He came to hide down here. He wouldn't let me out and I needed a food supply." He shrugs elegantly and Will hates him all over again. Chilton's pass is on the floor by his feet. It's been snapped in two. There are some gallon bottles of water near the bars of Hannibal's cage, and a half-eaten box of power bars is sitting beside them. He wonders how long Chilton had planned on hiding.

"Have you come to rescue me, Will? Or are you just making sure that I am still locked up?" 

Will's mouth curves into a ragged smile. 

"Something like that," he says. He could just leave Hannibal here to starve. It would be poetic justice. He stands up to look Hannibal in the face. His gun is heavy and cool to the touch, and he knows that he has exactly four rounds chambered. Chilton whimpers and moans on the ground, and Hannibal watches him impassively. 

_"Will!"_

Abigail is on the other side of the door, pounding on the glass. Her voice is muffled, but he can see the panic in her face. He looks at Hannibal and for a moment he wants to leave her outside, to protect her from the man standing in front of him. 

"Let her _in_ ," Hannibal hisses. 

Will shakes off the fog in his head and sprints the short distance to the door. Abigail all but falls in when it opens, clutching her rifle to her chest. 

"There's six of them," she says, "And I ran out of shells. Have you got him?" 

The door hisses shut behind her with a disquieting air of finality. 

"Yeah," Will says. "I've got him." 

He kneels down, so that he won't miss, and gives Chilton a _coup de grace_. They can't afford the bullet, not with six infected people- dead people- waiting outside, but he can't leave the man to linger. Hannibal's eyes are bright when Will unlocks his cell, and his smile is all teeth. 

"Thank you, Will," he says. He stretches his arms out, even though he had plenty of room to move in his cell, and steps neatly over the cooling lump of flesh that was Chilton. 

"Abigail," he says. "Give me your rifle." 

"It's not loaded," Abigail says. She hands it over anyways. 

"That won't be a problem," Hannibal says, hefting it experimentally. 

"Stay close to Will," he adds, as the door opens. 

+

Hannibal takes off, picking up speed, when they see the first zombie. Before Will can properly process what he's doing, he's used the barrel of Abigail's rifle to cave her head in, spraying blood and gloopy wet brain matter across the front steps of the hospital. 

Abigail shrieks, which catches the attention of the other five zombies. They converge on Hannibal and he doesn't even pause: he just raises the rifle over his head, biceps flexing, and brings it down on the nearest man with devastating effects. 

" _Jesus_ ," Will hisses. Hannibal is beating the zombies indiscriminately now, _gleefully_. He smashes a man's forehead in with the butt of the rifle and then whirls around to attack a woman with single-minded intensity. Will wants to throw up. Instead he aims for one of the zombies standing between them and the car. 

This is why he came, after all. Isn't it?

There are two zombies left now, and Hannibal is circling one and swinging the rifle thoughtfully. Will puts the second one down and grabs Abigail by the jacket, hurrying her towards the car. She twists to watch Hannibal, horrified and fascinated all at once. 

Will shoves Abigail into the back seat and pulls the spare clothes out of his backpack. He turns around just in time to see Hannibal land one last powerful blow to the prone creature on the ground. He's blood-spattered and smiling, with stubble on his chin and his hair in disarray, and when he looks up at them Will's breath catches in his chest.

Hannibal is holding the barrel of the rifle loosely in a bloody hand, and his hair has fallen forward over his face, like something out of a horror movie. Will finds himself clutching the clothes in his hands, and he forces himself to relax when Hannibal walks over to him. 

"Very thoughtful, Will," Hannibal says. There's a glint of amusement in his eyes.

Will tries not to breathe a sigh of relief when Hannibal hands him the rifle. Hannibal strips efficiently, right there, slipping out of his regulation slippers and his stained jumpsuit like he's shedding his skin. Will hands the clothes over, suddenly feeling awkward, and goes around to the driver's side of the car. He slides the gun underneath his seat and lets his head loll back against the headrest. On the other side of the car Hannibal is all pale limbs and blood-stained hands. He wipes them on the blue overalls before putting Will's clothes on, and then he climbs into the passenger seat beside Will. 

Will's clothing looks ridiculous on him. They might have to stop at a department store, he thinks absently. He looks down at Hannibal's slippered feet sticking out of his too-short jeans. They definitely have to stop at a department store.

"Are you hungry?" Will asks. The clicking of the turn indicator hangs in the air between them for a moment, and then Abigail leans forward, holding an apple in her hand. Hannibal takes it from her with a quirk of his lips.

"We didn't have much fresh fruit," Hannibal says to Will, in between bites of his apple. He rolls the window down to toss the core out of the car and gives the air outside a long, appreciative sniff. He looks like a drowning man coming up for air. Will realizes that he's staring and jerks his attention back to the road. When he glances in the rear view mirror, he can see Abigail curled up in the back seat beside their scavenged food, her eyes fixed on Hannibal. He can't read her expression.

He could, if he wanted to. He could know exactly what's on her mind, but he's been down that road before ( _We are her fathers, Will. It is up to us to protect her._ ) and it's nowhere he wants to go now. Especially with Hannibal Lecter sitting not two feet away from him, blood-splattered and refulgent. 

"You took her in?" Hannibal asks, following Will's gaze in the mirror. 

"I couldn't leave her," Will says. He hates how Hannibal can still drag answers out of him, even after everything. 

"I wouldn't have expected any less," Hannibal says. Once it would have comforted Will, to be understood so well by another person, but now it puts him on edge. He indicates again and merges onto the highway. There's a closed mall nearby; maybe Hannibal can find some suitable clothes there. 

There are bags of dog food crammed under the dashboard and Hannibal nudges them with his foot.

"Still collecting strays," he says. He's leaning against the window, almost dozing. He still looks like the most dangerous thing that Will has ever seen in his life. They breeze past an empty toll booth. 

"More like a guard dog, in this case," Will says, and Hannibal laughs. 

+

On the first night, Hannibal seems out of place in Will's living room, limned by fading sunlight and the dust swirling through the air. He's inspecting Will's bookshelf, and he almost looks like himself again, dressed in a suit stolen from a closed department store. Only Hannibal would steal _suits_ during the end of the world, Will thinks a little hysterically. 

Hannibal looks from the bed to Will and allows himself a smile that is probably at Will's expense. 

"Where will I be sleeping?" he asks. "On the floor?"

"No," Will says through gritted teeth. "You'll be with me."

"You _did_ miss me, Will," Hannibal says, and then, more seriously, "You are sharing your bed with the man who gutted you. Interesting decision, Will. How do you feel about that?"

"Well," Will says, because no way in hell is he letting Hannibal out of his sight, "Keep your enemies closer." He notices that he's been tracing the scar on his stomach and drops his hand to his side. Hannibal's eyes follow the movement. He still has a strange, satisfied smile on his face. 

But when it comes time to go to bed, he puts on his stolen silk pajamas and slides into Will's bed without comment. The mattress dips under the unfamiliar weight of another body, and Will rolls towards the edge to compensate. He lies awake for a long time, listening to Hannibal's steady breathing in the darkness, the little hissing sound he makes on the exhale, and to his own pulse in his ears. 

He's just about to drift off when he hears the footsteps on the porch. He can still hear Hannibal's breathing, calm and steady, but his arms and legs feel leaden, like he's been tied down to the bed by invisible ropes. He can't lift his head. He rolls his eyes upwards and tries to move his fingers where they're clamped around his pillow. They won't move beyond an abortive twitch. He's paralyzed and _something_ wants inside the room. Antlers rasp against the walls. 

He watches the clock tick over from 9:34 to 9:35. He can hear normal night sounds outside, can feel Hannibal turning over in his sleep. He's not waking up and Will _can't move_. How can Hannibal be asleep? 

It's already inside, something malevolent clopping across the floor and it wants his heart and his guts and his soul and if he gives in for just one moment- just one- a strange whining sob breaks the silence of his room. The thing is hovering just over his shoulder, where he can't see it.

 _There is something in his room._ There is something in his room and the ferocity and sheer malevolence in the air set his heart pounding. Will realizes that the sound he's hearing is his body trying to scream. His mouth won't cooperate. The stag is standing over his bed now, antlers garlanded with intestines-

"Will!" 

Someone is shaking his shoulders. Will lashes out with his leg, spasming, and then jerks away as his limbs come to life. The stag disappears and Will finds himself clinging to the edge of the bed with tears streaming down his cheeks. Hannibal's hands are on his shoulders.

"Will. Are you all right?" Hannibal's hands are warm through his t-shirt, and he lets himself sag back against them. He needs to get out of the bedroom. 

Will follows Hannibal into the kitchen and watches as he makes a pot of tea. His quiet efficiency is hypnotic and the clink of china on china is a soothing sound after the night terrors. 

"You had an episode of sleep paralysis," Hannibal says. He hands Will a mug brimming with tea and leans against the sink. 

"I felt like I was going to be e-" Will falters. 

"Eaten alive?" Hannibal finishes for him, not unkindly.

" _Devoured,_ " Will says. 

 

Will stays up the rest of the night, working on a lure and watching Hannibal sleep. He lets the dogs out at dawn and follows them outside, walking barefoot through the dew-soaked grass. The world is very quiet. There are no cars roaring in the distance, and he hasn't seen a plane for days. The birds are still singing, though, and one of his dogs is galloping back to him holding a trophy in her dribbling mouth. It's a tennis ball so matted with mud that it's turned grey-brown. He smiles in spite of himself, and throws it for his pack until the sun is high in the sky. 

When he hears the shower creak on upstairs he heads back inside. Breakfast is oatmeal or dry cereal, because it's easy to find in bulk and it doesn't go bad quickly. They're not quite at starvation rations yet, and Will hopes that the government does something before they reach that point. Aid drops every few weeks suddenly doesn't seem like enough. He doesn't know how bad it is further west. There's no news, now. Just barricaded cities and suspicious neighbors and bands of opportunistic raiders. He allows himself a moment of morbid pleasure at the thought of Hannibal coming across a pack of them, and then he wants to be sick. 

He makes himself a mug of coffee. Abigail is already at the table, examining her battered rifle while she snacks on dry cereal. Her cleaning kit is set out neatly on the table beside her bowl. 

"I think it's broken," she says. Will comes over to her side and sips his coffee while she shows him the damage.

"He bent the bore," she says, peering down the barrel of the gun. She should know better than to do that at all, he thinks, but he lets it be. Abigail knows just as much about guns as he does. 

"Can you fix it?" he asks, even though he knows the answer before she shakes her head. 

He can hear Hannibal fussing in the bathroom, and then a light step on the stairs that signals his arrival. 

"You broke her gun," he tells Hannibal, when the other man comes into the kitchen. He's shaved and trimmed his hair, and aside from a little hollowness about the face, he looks like he used to. More silver in his hair, perhaps. Hannibal doesn't deign to respond to Will's words: he only raises an eloquent eyebrow and pours himself a cup of coffee. 

"We have more," Will adds. He really feels extraordinarily tired. But if he goes to sleep that- _thing_ might come back. He drains his cup and goes for more coffee. 

"Perhaps I can make it up with a hunting trip," Hannibal says, as he sits down across from Abigail. She gives him a nervous smile, but she doesn't hesitate to go get dressed. Will wonders if she's actually afraid of Hannibal, or if it's knowing what he did that bothers her. 

+

They sit on the porch while they wait for Abigail to come down.

"Where did you find her?" Hannibal asks. He's turning his mug around in his hands, using just his fingertips to keep from getting burned. It's so deftly done that it must be from long habit. His fingers are hypnotic, dancing around the sides of the mug. For a moment Will forgets the question. 

"She found me," he says. He'd woken up one day, not too long after the paper stopped coming and the helicopters started flying urgently overhead, and Abigail had been walking up his drive with a rifle and a worn-in backpack. "The dead are rising from their graves, and Abigail turns up at my door." He takes a sip of his coffee. "I thought I'd finally cracked."

He'd mistaken her for Alana when she came up the drive. She was taller, older; a woman. Her hair was pulled into a greasy braid and he only realized who she was when he saw the mottled pink lump where her right ear should have been. The sudden understanding was a body blow; he stumbled out onto his porch on clumsy feet, head reeling. 

_She was alive._ After all that- he had gone to jail for her. He had lost everything, and Hannibal- Hannibal had- Will leaned against one of the porch columns, and fought the urge to open another bottle of Johnny Walker. Abigail was standing at the foot of the steps now, surrounded by snuffling dogs.

Hannibal had let it happen. Worse, Hannibal had made it happen. He had enjoyed it, almost certainly. Will sucked a breath in through his teeth, trying to calm down, trying to remember how to breathe. 

Abigail was alive. Somehow it cut deeper than any other blow Hannibal had leveled at him. Out of everything, out of all of his deceptions and cruelties, this one was the worst. When he looked up again Abigail was watching him with wide blue eyes.

She had _known_. She had known, and she had let it happen. A sudden sob hitched itself in his throat and he forced it down. Abigail wasn't his little girl, that much was clear.

"Will?" she asked, uncertain. 

"What happened to your ear?" he asked, almost snarling, and her hand flew up to the mass of scar tissue at her temple. She flushed. 

"Will- I-" 

She actually took a step backwards when he came down the stairs, and that was like another knife to the chest.

"Abigail," he said. He captured her hand in his, pulling it away to reveal the scar snaking around her ear. It was very neat. Professional, even. 

"Hannibal," she had said. Tears were brimming in her eyes. "He said it was the only way." 

Will dropped his head and looked down at their joined hands. His thumb was (is) a little crooked where he'd broken it. Her fingers were calloused and grimy with road dirt. Artist's hands: paint was dried into her nail beds. She'd kept up her marksmanship, too. 

Hannibal hadn't killed Abigail. As far as Will could see, Hannibal hadn't had any reason to leave her alive; he _shouldn't_ have. He was a psychopath; love and respect for life were supposed to be beyond his grasp, and, yet, here was Abigail, standing in front of Will, alive against all the odds. 

Hannibal had spared her. 

Will reached out to touch her face, and then thought better of it and reached for the strap on her shoulder. Her pack rattled when he took it. It sounded like metal: canned food, maybe, or ammunition. She had a rifle slung over her other shoulder. 

He considered that he might be hallucinating all of it: the zombies, the emergency, Abigail. Maybe his mind had finally snapped under the pressure and he was seeing dead people where there were living bodies. He'd spent most of his career at the FBI resurrecting the dead in one way or another. It wouldn't be surprising, really, for his mind to take a turn like this. 

"Why are you here?" he'd asked.

"I hitched," Abigail had replied. "I didn't... I didn't feel safe without you."

And Will had stood, dumbfounded, and watched as she marched into his house like it was her right to be there. (In a way, he thought, she had every right.) 

"Why didn't you kill her?" Will asks. 

"I saw something of myself in her," Hannibal says. It's carefully flat, like he's hiding something. Will frowns. 

"Me too," he says.

Hannibal nods, like he expected to hear that, and then turns to face Will. "Do you trust me with Abigail?" he asks. 

"No," Will says, frankly. Hannibal is looking at his face; he focuses on the steam rising from his coffee, avoiding Hannibal's eyes. A bluebird screams in the distance. Gnats are hovering over the mound of earth where they buried the dead man. 

"You know that she is one of the only people I would never hurt," Hannibal says, and Will remembers the sharp burn of the knife when Hannibal twisted it.

"Until you get bored," he says, unable to keep the acid out of his voice. He hadn't killed her the first time, but now that he was sitting at Will's side, Will realizes that it meant almost nothing. Hannibal still bewilders him.

"I will keep her safe, Will," Hannibal says placidly. "You need to get some sleep." 

"I don't want to... wake up like that again," Will admits. It's hardly the worst thing that's happened to him, but it's also not an experience that he's eager to repeat. 

"Then wait until we're home," Hannibal says. He finishes his coffee and stands up. He waits for a moment, to see if Will is coming in, and then he goes inside to find his coat. It's not quite fall yet, but there's still a chill in the air. 

A helicopter thrums by, somewhere far away. Will finishes his coffee and watches Abigail and Hannibal walk into the woods, guns balanced over their shoulders. He sits on the porch until they've completely disappeared from sight. 

+

They come back with quail, and wild mushrooms, and Hannibal makes them dinner that night. Will hovers in the kitchen and doesn't bother coming up with an excuse for his presence. Even knowing where the meat comes from, he feels queasy about Hannibal's cooking. 

He can't keep the food down, in the end. He keeps thinking about protein scrambles and tenderloin with pomegranate sauce and chicken soup. Even the wine seems to sour in his memory. He rests his head on the cool edge of the toilet bowl and allows himself a bitter laugh. _Pomegranates_. Of course it would be pomegranates. Then something chunky comes up his esophagus and he has to duck down again. It splatters against the bowl, yellow and green, and he hates himself.

He should have _seen_. 

He doesn't sleep that night. He sits by the fireplace, listening to the flames crackling behind him, and watches Hannibal's face change in the flickering light. 

He's opened Pandora's box, and all the regret in the world won't fix that.

"Hey," Alana says. " _Hey_. You okay?" 

Will jerks his head up from his knees. He'd fallen asleep at some point- but there's only Hannibal, sprawled across his bed. The front door is locked and the curtains are closed. He pads over and pulls one of the curtains aside, half-frightened of what he might see.

There's nothing. Of course there's nothing. 

Everything he has is already here.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Will," Hannibal says, "I cannot abide this anymore." He sets the books down, turns on his heel, and marches back upstairs, leaving Will standing bewildered in his wake. He looks at Winston. Winston only raises his doggy eyebrows and sighs.

Will is stacking wood by the fireplace the next morning when Hannibal appears at the foot of the stairs. He has some of Will's books under his arm. 

"Will," Hannibal says, "I cannot abide this anymore." He sets the books down, turns on his heel, and marches back upstairs, leaving Will standing bewildered in his wake. He looks at Winston. Winston only raises his doggy eyebrows and sighs. 

Hannibal clears his throat and Will looks up to find him standing by the bed with a pair of scissors in his hand. He's wearing the face that Will imagines he used to wear when he was breaking bad news to waiting families. A little pained, but firm and implacable all at once. And a little glint of something in his eyes, something that you'd miss if you weren't looking for it.

_Amusement._

"Will," Hannibal says. "We must do something about your hair."

Hannibal plucks the glasses off of Will's face, ignoring his scowl, and guides him into the dining room. Will sits on one of the chairs, flipped around so that he's straddling the back.

"What do you plan on doing, after the electricity goes?" Hannibal's breath ruffles Will's hair when he speaks. The scissors snip steadily behind his ears, scrape against the nape of his neck. 

"Lentils," Will says, "and fish, and game, and- uh- fire. It's not like we're going to run out of wood." 

"We should move," Hannibal says. "There are places where people have gathered. It's not safe for you to be so isolated." He pushes Will's head down, fingers cool and professional. 

"I thought you'd like that," Will says softly. The scissors pause for a moment, and then Hannibal resumes his work. They don't speak while he finishes cutting Will's hair. Will watches as greasy curls fall to the floor and pile up at his feet. He rubs a hand across the scraggly beard that has taken up permanent residence on his face, and decides to borrow Hannibal's razor. He might as well go all out. 

He's nearly finished shaving when he hears a dog howling in the distance. He does a quick mental tally: all of his dogs are loafing on his bed, or were: they're barking now, paws scrabbling on the floor and walls. Will splashes his face with water and grabs his coat and a leash on his way out the door. Hannibal follows him, after shutting the door on the dogs. 

The last time he'd heard a dog on his property it had been his mind turning on him, part of Hannibal's design. This time, though, the dog is real. It's cowering at the edge of the forest. It's a little thing, black and rangy, with flopping ears and buggy eyes. Blood is crusted onto its forehead, around a livid red-and-white slash where it's cut itself. As soon as Will reaches into his pocket, it scuttles into the trees. 

A silhouetted form, huge and indistinct, disappears into the shadows further back. Will blinks it away and doesn't mention it to Hannibal.

Hannibal has stopped a few feet behind him, and he's standing perfectly still, watching. Good. It would frighten the dog even more if they both tried to grab it. Will drops a few treats on the ground and steps back to give the dog some space. The food works: the little mutt barely hesitates before it comes out to investigate. It finishes the food and retreats again, wary, but it doesn't run into the woods. Will puts down another treat, and the dog edges closer.

It obviously wants company. It's just been running scared, starving and alone. He wonders where it came from. There haven't been any people in the area, they would have noticed. 

"Come on," he says. He holds out another treat and grabs the dog when it darts forward. Will loops his leash around the dog's neck in a slack noose and gives it the treat. 

"Good dog," he says. The dog does a whole-body wriggle, and he wonders how old it is. 

"Where did you come from?" Will asks, as they turn back towards the house. 

"Will," Hannibal says, from behind him. When Will turns around, the dog tugging at the leash, Hannibal has stopped walking and is staring at something on the ground. He looks up at Will. 

"Someone was here," he says. Will comes over to where he's standing and sees what he missed the first time: a broken beer bottle. 

It didn't get here on it's own. Someone came out to the field. Drawn by the lights of the house? Will bites his lip. 

"It's not safe," Hannibal says. He sounds like he's won something.

Will is almost positive that nothing in the world is more dangerous than the man standing beside him. He scans the fields and looks back at the woods, but there are no obvious signs of life. Whoever is was isn't here anymore. The black dog is leaning against his leg, nuzzling him affectionately. 

"Come on," Will says. They leave the bottle glinting in the sun. 

 

Will is dozing in the armchair next to the fire, dogs piled at his feet, when he hears Abigail's door open upstairs. It's followed by the sound of her coming down the stairs, slowly and carefully as if she wants to avoid waking them. When she appears on the landing, she's clutching the little black dog in her arms. It wriggles happily in her embrace.

"He needs the bathroom," she says. Some of the other dogs are looking up, sleepily curious. 

The dog is very young indeed, but Abigail has claimed him as her own and named him Pyewacket. She had held him anxiously while Hannibal examined the gash on his head, and had helped to hold him down while Hannibal cleaned the wound. He had only yelped a little; otherwise he showed no sign of feeling any pain at all. In the two days since they found him, the gash has scabbed over and begun turning pink at the edges, and Pyewacket has become devoted to Abigail. 

"Okay," Will says, covering a yawn with his hand. He pushes himself out of the armchair and navigates his way through his dogs to the front door. His hand shakes when he takes Pywacket's leash off of it's hook, but the fire has burned down to bare embers and it's too dark for Abigail to see. 

He stands in the open door while Abigail takes Pyewacket out onto the grass. It's cool outside, and crickets are singing in the grass. There's no sign of anything lurking in the darkness, but he lets his hand rest on the rifle by the door nonetheless. He can hear Abigail speaking to Pyewacket, soft indistinct words of praise while he snuffles through the grass. He picks up the gun and goes out to sit on the steps, slinging the rifle over his knees. Fireflies flicker in and out in the distance, hallucinatory in their briefness. If it was any other world, it would be a perfect night. 

Winston flops down beside him and sighs. 

"I know," Will says. "I know." He reaches out and scratches Winston behind one shaggy ear.

Abigail settles down next to them and Pyewacket curls up at her side. 

"We found a bus," she says. "Yesterday, while we were hunting. It was just sitting on the side of the road. A yellow school bus, you know?"

"Hannibal didn't mention it." He wonders if Hannibal is enjoying this, so many roofs falling in on so many believers. 

"It was empty," she says. "Some of the seats had been ripped up, but there were no..." She tugs Pyewacket into her lap. "I can't stop thinking about the kids," she says. "They must have been on the bus." 

Will slips his hand into hers, and this time she lets him.

The next day, Hannibal cleans up the backyard, working in the sun until his shirt is soaked with sweat. Will watches him, and wonders where Abigail's missing children are. A few months ago it would have made headlines, would have pulled in every specialist the FBI had to offer. It would have been an event. Now, it's just another small horror in world full of them. 

Every time Hannibal goes out hunting with Abigail, Will waits at home, nearly vibrating with tension. Hannibal never brings back anything but birds, and, once, a buck strung heavily between his strong shoulders and Abigail's slim frame.

The dead do not disturb them.

But the living are another matter. 

+

There are people on the road. They're far off and indistinct, but Will can tell that there are at least five of them, maybe more. A shiver shudders down his spine as he watches them wend their way up the road. People mean trouble, now. He hopes they're just lost; maybe they'll keep going. The dogs snarl and bark, excited, and the screen door slams behind Hannibal as he steps out onto the porch. He has a hunting rifle in his hand. 

Hannibal braces his rifle on his shoulder and sights down the scope until Will grabs the barrel and jerks it down. 

"No!" he snaps. Hannibal turns on him, for a moment, something wild in his eyes. He masters himself almost immediately, but it still sends a jolt of fear through Will. It's like looking a lion in the face and knowing that you're prey. There's nothing in his gaze to reason with, nothing human behind it. Will is rooted on the spot for a moment, hand clamped around the barrel of the rifle, and then he shakes off his instinctive response and lets go. 

Hannibal isn't actually an animal. Probably.

Something black flickers at the edge of his vision and he blinks it away, irritably. 

"Put it down," Will says, watching the ragtag group walking towards them. There's no need to provoke them if they're not looking for trouble in the first place. Hannibal props the gun against the wall and takes up a place behind Will's shoulder. 

There are two women and two men, as far as he can make out, and there don't seem to be any children with them. They stop just short of the driveway and turn to talk among themselves. Will glances at Hannibal, who is staring impassively, and then looks back at the walkers. They're dirty and thin, wearing frayed clothes and straw sun hats. They look exhausted. They don't look threatening, so Will steps off of the porch and goes out to meet them.

He's halfway to them when he registers the glint of sunshine on metal. The screen door creaks open behind him and he turns around just in time to see Abigail on the porch, picking up the rifle. A shot rings out, and then another, and then Abigail drops the gun and sinks to the ground. When Will turns back around, hand grasping at the place where his Glock should be, Hannibal is already ahead of him. He's holding a long, thin coil of metal in his hand, and he leaps on the man who'd shot Abigail as Will hurries to catch up with him. One of the strangers is already dead: Abigail hadn't missed her target. 

So much for peaceful first contact, he thinks. 

"Get back to Abigail!" Hannibal gasps. He slams into the next man and pulls his chin back, and Will is racing back to Abigail's side before he can see what Hannibal does. 

Abigail is curled on her side on the porch, clutching her arm with a blood-stained hand. Will can guess what the strangers wanted to do, now: kill them all and live in his house, or take his food. Life is cheap now, and food and shelter are priceless. 

"Abigail," he says, "let me see." Her face is pale and shocky when she looks up at him, but she lifts her hand so that he can see what the damage is. He forces back memories of her lying on her kitchen floor, life blood pouring out of her neck. He had been so helpless, and she was dying, and he needed Hannibal-

Will shakes it off, and focuses on what's in front of him. 

It's only a graze, really, on the outside of her arm. It's a miracle that she wasn't hit somewhere more vital, but she's still losing enough blood to make him worry. He replaces her hand on her arm and presses down, applying pressure to slow the bleeding. 

"Come on, Abigail," he says, "let's get inside." She grimaces when he hauls her to her feet, but otherwise she's pale and stoic in his arms. When he glances over his shoulder, Hannibal is straddling a prone figure, teeth bared. The other strangers are all on the ground, presumably dead. If they aren't yet, they will be very soon. He can feel his heart pounding in his chest, and he has to force himself not to go out and shoot the bastards that Hannibal is very efficiently taking care of. 

He settles Abigail on the the couch, jams the pillows under her feet, and grabs the first aid kit from beside the door. A little color comes back into her face when he finishes bandaging her arm. It's not terribly neat, but it will keep until Hannibal can take a closer look at her. 

"Are you okay?" he asks. He takes her hand in his own bloodstained one. 

"I guess I've had worse," she says. She has had worse, and all of it at his hands. Now she'll have another scar to add to her collection. Pyewacket is nuzzling her anxiously, propping his front feet up on the edge of the couch. 

The noise outside has subsided. 

"I'm going to go make sure they're gone," Will says, squeezing her hand. "Don't move." 

"There go my plans for the night," Abigail says, giving him a watery smile. 

When he gets outside, Hannibal has shucked off his coat and is arranging the bodies in a neat row. There are only four bodies; Will's hallucinations must be getting worse. Hannibal has a woman slung over his shoulder. She hangs limply in his grasp, back bowed like a rose with a broken stem. They'll have to bury the bodies before nightfall, he supposes, or maybe even burn them. Hannibal all but tosses the woman onto the ground beside the other bodies.

He sees them as pigs. Of course he would. Will doesn't think much more of them, himself. He wonders if he would have been so callous a year ago, or even a month ago. 

When he comes up closer to the first man, it takes Will a long moment to parse what he's looking at. He sees a body and a neck and then a fleshy slide of skin, folded like an accordion or a pushed-up sleeve. It's sloughed off to one side and it only slowly comes to Will that he's looking at a face, or what used to be a face. 

The world reels, and Hannibal offers a steadying hand. Will shoves it away, recoiling from the other man. His foot catches on something and he hits the ground hard, and when he looks up, he's sitting beside another body. This one has a gaping slice taken out of his throat. Hannibal all but beheaded him.

"What did you expect?" Hannibal asks. He's standing with his hands in his pockets, the sun a halo behind his head. He walks up to Will and stands over him, composed and menacing. The sun is glaring behind him so that Will has to shade his eyes. 

"When you brought me into your home, Will, what did you expect?" Hannibal asks. 

"How-" Will closes his eyes, steadies himself. "How did you do that?"

"Piano wire," Hannibal replies, like they're discussing a recipe, "makes an excellent garrote."

Will stares at him for a moment, and then throws his hands up in disbelief. "You know where the shovel is," he says. "Don't- don't bury them in the vegetable garden."

"First I will attend to Abigail," Hannibal says, completely ignoring the sarcasm in Will's voice. He follows him to the house. "How is she?" 

"She'll live," Will says. He holds the door for Hannibal, distracted, and watches as he helps Abigail off the couch. Hannibal had insisted on stopping at a pharmacy when they rescued him, and Will is grateful for it now. Hannibal looks positively fatherly, hovering over her as they ascend the stairs. Abigail will be fine. Will pulls a bottle out of his liquor cabinet and uncorks it. He doesn't bother with a glass. 

 

He's halfway through the bottle and the world is pleasantly hazy by the time Hannibal comes back downstairs, wearing a new suit and wiping his hands on a towel. He frowns at the bottle, but lets it go.

"Abigail is asleep," he says from the kitchen. He pours himself a glass of wine and comes out to join Will. "It was a shallow wound. I stitched it and gave her a sedative. It could have been worse."

"We always get our pound of flesh from her, don't we?" 

"Better than the alternative," Hannibal says. His gaze sharpens for a moment. 

"Will," he says. "Have you heard from Alana?" 

"No," Will says. For a moment he thinks that Hannibal somehow knows about the auditory hallucinations, but then he realizes that Hannibal is just asking where she is.

"Not at all?" Hannibal asks.

"She isn't picking up," Will says. "I don't even know if she's at home." He takes another shot of whiskey. 

"After today, I am worried for her safety," Hannibal says. He looks grave. Will thinks it's an act. It's probably an act.

"No," he says. "She's- she'll be fine." 

"Out there? On her own?"

"She might have been at Quantico," Will says. She could be anywhere. 

"You don't want to know?" Hannibal probes, putting down his glass. Will fixes him with a glare.

"She's alive," he says. It's more desperate hope than reasoned fact, but sometimes it's the only thing that keeps him going. Hannibal frowns. "I know she's alive," Will adds. 

"She might be dead," Hannibal says. "You don't know."

"No," Will says. He can't swallow, suddenly, or breathe. "No," he says, shaking his head. "You're wrong. You're lying."

"Will," Hannibal says gently, "if she's alive, wouldn't she have come here? Or at least called to check on you?" He lays a hand on Will's shoulder. "Accept it, Will, she's gone." 

Will backhands him across his face. Hannibal goes sprawling backwards and Will doesn't hesitate, lets the monster inside roil up as he launches himself at Hannibal. Hannibal scrambles to his feet, using the kitchen table for leverage, and then he slams Will into the wall. Will's teeth rattle in his head, but all he can feel is fear, and rage. He slams his elbow into Hannibal's kidneys and follows up with an uppercut to his chin. 

They crash backwards into the front room, scrabbling like animals, and Hannibal trips on the rug and cracks his head on Will's wardrobe. When he hits the ground he stays down, eyes glazed and face bloodied, and Will falls upon him. He isn't sure what he wants to do- he wants to punch, to tear, to strangle. He grasps Hannibal by his lapels and then, suddenly, realizes what he's doing. For a moment they stare at each other, panting for breath. Will lets go of Hannibal's lapels. The knife in Hannibal's hand clatters to the ground. 

Will is back against the door before he knows he's moved. 

"Oh god," he says. He draws his legs up and drops his head between his knees. Hannibal is also sitting up. He swipes a thumb across his bleeding lip and licks it absently. The knife glints in his hand. 

"You could have gone for her," he says. "Gone to her house, seen if she was safe. Instead you came for me. Why?"

Will looks at Hannibal, blood-covered and bedraggled, with a knife glinting in his hand, and wonders what he's brought into his home. A guard dog, yes, but also a nightmare, a swarm of black flies hovering at his shoulder. 

Hannibal pockets the knife and crawls over to where Will is sitting, and then he presses his mouth to Will's.

Will leans into it for a moment, mirroring Hannibal unconsciously, and then he jerks away, pressing his bloodied hands to Hannibal's shoulders. 

"No, please," Will says, and he hates the way his voice shakes. "Please don't." 

Hannibal draws back, his face inscrutable.

"It's not..." Will sucks in a breath and forces himself to meet Hannibal's gaze. "Not now," he says. It's feeble, but it seems to work. Hannibal purses his lips in what is most definitely a pout, and re-settles himself on the floor at a respectable distance from Will. He seems like he's honoring Will's tenuous boundaries, but Will knows better than that. He's given Hannibal something, even if he's not sure what it is. The cannibal smiles at him. 

"You obviously still have very strong feelings about Alana Bloom," he says. 

Will lets his head thump back against the door again. 

"I don't need to discuss this," he says to the ceiling.

"You do," Hannibal says. "For your own good. How long has it been since you have spoken to her?" 

How did he always know? Will rubs a hand across his forehead, forgetting the blood on his fingers. 

"I don't want to talk about it," he says. 

"How long?" Hannibal asks again. Will knows that if he looks up, Hannibal's face will be a perfect mask of professionalism. 

"Since the trial," he says. It feels like Hannibal has dragged the words out of him. 

"Three years? Did you quarrel?"

If only. Will wishes he could sink into the floor. 

"No," Will says. He blinks moisture out of his eyes. "I was drinking."

"You drank before and it did not affect your relationships. What changed?" Hannibal shifts his weight, shoes dragging on the floor.

"I don't know," Will says. "I drank more, and... it was like a cocoon that protected me from the outside world. All of those reporters, all those curious faces, the hybristophiliacs-" he swallows. "I drank, and I kept on drinking."

"You changed."

"I was angry and I lashed out at Alana," Will says. "I thought she wanted me to join AA. She said we were codependent. I wasn't happy when she was here and she wasn't happy either. So, uh-"

He sneaks a glance at Hannibal's hands. The knife is on the floor, and his long fingers are interlaced over his kneecap.

"You drove her away?" Hannibal asks.

"No. We just- drifted apart. She said we weren't healthy, that she was going to give me space. She asked me to call her when I was better."

"And you didn't call," Hannibal fills in.

"I assumed she would come." 

Hannibal expels a breath that's almost a sigh. Will looks up at him. 

"That's why I didn't go to her house, I guess."

"You were afraid she wouldn't want to see you?"

"I didn't know if she was there. She could be in Hawaii, for all I know." A smile curls around his lips. "I didn't want to go there and find her dead." The very thought of driving over to Alana's house makes him panic, fills him with anxiety and dread. His mind goes blank, and it's like there's a wall between him and the possibility of getting into his car and and driving over and finding out. 

"I can't," he snaps, more to himself than Hannibal. "I let her go. I can't face finding her dead."

"Reaching out goes both ways, Will," Hannibal says. 

"No," Will says. "I expected her to come and save me."

"And now it's too late for you to save her," Hannibal says, and Will starts to cry. 

"Will," Hannibal murmurs. He crawls over to Will's side, leaving the knife behind, and wraps his arm around Will's shoulders. Will doesn't fight it this time: he presses his face into Hannibal's shirt and accepts the embrace. They sit like that for a long time, until Will has emptied himself of everything; of three long years of loneliness and pain and longing. Will fists his hands in Hannibal's sleeves, the slippery silk soft between his fingers, and says "Please."

 _Please_. If anyone can fix this, it's Hannibal. Will is beyond caring how Hannibal does it: he can find Alana, or make Will forget that she ever existed, or make him hate her entirely. Will will let him do anything. He knows that he's making a deal with the devil, this time, and it's surprisingly easy to just let go.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is short, but more is coming. Happy Season 2!

The sound of the shovel biting into the dry earth is abrasive in the stillness of the evening, but Will finds it soothing. His hands are burning, already rubbed raw by the rough wood of the shovel, and the sting grounds him, drags him back down to earth. His name is Will Graham. He lives in Wolf Trap, Virginia. The world has gone insane, but the ground beneath his feet is still solid and it takes him a long time to dig a grave.

He had been planning to bury the strangers in individual graves, to give them back a little of the grace they had lost in life, but by the time he had finished digging the first grave, the sun was sinking in the sky. He couldn't leave the corpses out overnight, so he rolled two of them- fleshy, flapping, still-bleeding- into the first grave. He had brushed off Hannibal's offer to help: this was something he had to do himself.

He doesn't finish the second grave until after nightfall. There's a lamp on downstairs, and he can faintly see Hannibal silhouetted in the front window. He's doing something to the piano, Will thinks, as he drags the third body over to the new grave. He dumps the woman in as gently as he can, and turns away so that he doesn't see her her bounce when she hits the bottom, like a puppet with its strings cut. The last body is a man, solid and heavily built, and Will's muscles scream in protest as he drags the sagging body over the grass. The man's head drags grotesquely, attached to his body only by the column of his spine.

Will kicks the body into the grave with a grimace, and forces down the memories that come up like bile. He feels like he's spent his entire life standing over open graves. The supine forms in the grave are just a jumbled collection of lumps and lines, barely even human in the dark. Will shovels dirt into the grave, working quickly, tamps it down with blistered hands, and leaves the dead to the stars and the moonlight.

 

When Will wakes up the next morning, he feels like he's been run over by a truck. Hannibal is nowhere to be found and Abigail is still in a drugged sleep, so Will showers, hissing when soap gets into his wounds. He dresses in fresh clothes, wraps his battered body in a coat, and takes a cup of tea out onto the porch. Laundry is hanging on a line in the sun, off-white sheets and towels and one lonely shirt snapping in the wind. The sun is bright, but the air is cold. Will wonders if it'll start snowing soon, if the electricity will hold out that long.

The car is gone. He must have been sound asleep when Hannibal left the house. He sips his tea and lets his mind drift, watching the sheets dance on the line. He doesn't wonder if Hannibal will come back, or about where he has gone: they've been due for a supply run for a week, at least, and there's no question in his mind that Hannibal will come back for him. He is, after all, Hannibal's creature.

He catches a glimpse of something dark and antlered watching him from between the fluttering bed linen. It disappears when he turns to look at it more closely, so he finishes his lukewarm tea and goes inside. The dogs are dozing on the bed, and Abigail's room is silent.

The lid of the piano is open. He's had it since he moved in, but he can't recall the last time he played it. Will idles his fingers over the keys, testing, and finds that it's perfectly tuned, except for one key that makes no sound at all. It says something about Hannibal, that he would take the time to tune an unplayable piano to perfection.

He rinses out his mug and leaves it on the counter to dry. A breakfast of stewed lentils is unappealing, he decides, peering into the fridge. It's all they have until Hannibal comes back with more supplies. His lip curls at the thought.

"Will?"

Abigail's voice drifts down the stairs. When he reaches her room, trailed by three curious dogs, she's sitting up in her bed, covers shoved down to her knees. She looks drowsy and confused, black hair standing up around her head in a tangled halo.

"Can you pour me some water?" Abigail asks. Pyewacket's tail thumps against the mattress when he sees Will at the door, and he wriggles in Abigail's arms. Will smiles and refills the glass on her bedside table from the pitcher that Hannibal had left for her.

"How's your arm?" he asks her, settling on the corner of the bed. He picks up the book she'd been reading and leafs through it idly as she shakes out two pills from a bottle and washes them down with the water.

"It hurts," she says. "And I'm really tired. Is Hannibal gone?"

Will nods.

"He said he was getting supplies," she says, scooting down the bed. Will tugs the covers back up over her body. She's already drifting off.

"Stay with me?" Abigail asks.

"Okay," Will says. He kicks off his shoes and settles in behind her, a little awkwardly. His bruises sting when he lays on them, but Abigail's head on his shoulder is worth the pain. He wraps an arm around her, and drops a kiss on her glossy hair.

"Sleep," he says. "I'll be here."

The book falls open when he picks it up again, to a page that's dog-eared and smudged from use.

_731_

_"I want"—it pleaded—All its life—_  
 _I want—was chief it said_  
 _When Skill entreated it—the last—_  
 _And when so newly dead—_

He closes the book and tosses it blindly onto the floor. The dogs clatter back down the stairs, nails scraping and clicking, and Will pulls Abigail a little closer.

He waits.

 

 

A ringing phone jolts him awake. The phone had gone silent months ago, and he had assumed that it was dead. It rings again, loud and strident in the empty house, and he slides out of Abigail's bed as quickly as he can.

She doesn't wake up when he moves, and he makes a mental note to check her medication- the phone rings a third time and Will all but throws himself down the stairs to catch it before it stops. He finds the handset mid-ring, and punches the SEND button breathlessly.

"Hello?"

No one answers.

" _Hello?_ " Will says again. Perhaps he had been dreaming, or had another hypnagogic hallucination.

He hears someone breathing on the other end of the line, and the beginning of a sob, and then the call disconnects with a sharp click.

He pulls the phone away from his ear and stares at the darkened screen. Alana's number blinks in the display, one, two, three times, and then disappears. Will hits redial.

The phone rings twice, and even before it cuts off he knows something's wrong.

_"We're sorry; you have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service. If you feel you have reached this recording in error, please check the number and try your call again."_

He ends the call, hands shaking, and carefully dials Alana's number again.

_"We're sorry; you have reached a number-"_

Will hangs up and resists the urge to throw the phone at the wall.

"I'm going crazy," he murmurs. He sets the phone down on the table, carefully, and goes back onto the porch. The dogs follow him, tails wagging.

There's no Wendigo hiding in the laundry. The woods are dark and silent and empty, and the broad fields offer up no clues as to what he should do. He and Alana had walked there together, once. In another life.

He stares a little longer, hoping that the horizon will offer up an answer, but the only thing he sees is the tire tracks that Hannibal left on the drive. Will sinks down onto the steps. Winston leans against him, and he pulls the dog against his side.

He has to wait for Hannibal to come back.

"What's happening, Winston?" he asks.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I've made some changes to this, fleshed it out a little more, based on suggestions from my beta and feedback from my readers. I hope it flows better, now. Updated 6-17-14.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Character death! Seriously.

“It is June.  
I am tired of being brave.”  
-The Truth the Dead Know, Anne Sexton

 

It's late when Will sees headlights in the distance. Night has fallen and Will is alone in the kitchen, nursing a tumbler of whiskey and listening to the crack of the fire in the hearth. It's a peaceful evening, even if his mind keeps on returning to the phone call that he's beginning to think he hallucinated. In the dim light of the fire, his house looks safe, and a little like it's been caught out of time. The light from the fire flickers across the windows and the sleeping dogs, bathing everything in a warm, homely haze.

He can't get the phone call out of his head. It keeps circling around and around, repeating like a scratched record. It had been Alana's voice, he's sure of it, and besides, there's no earthly reason for someone to crank call him from her number. 

He rubs a finger along the rim of his glass, slick with whiskey under his thumb, and chokes down on the bile that rises in his throat. 

He'd only tried her number once. She hadn't picked up and Will- he had gone straight for the liquor cabinet. He takes a sip of his whiskey, licks the pad of his thumb, and hates himself. 

He'd let her go, selfishly, and now Hannibal is gone and Alana is gone and he can't help but suspect- no- he _knows_ why Alana called him. He may be blinkered when it comes to Hannibal's true nature- self-imposed denial has never been a problem for Will, who blanks out half the world as a matter of habit- but he knows exactly what Hannibal is. And Hannibal had been so insistent that she was dead. 

He wonders what Hannibal will say, when he comes home. Will he even bother to pick up supplies, or will he try bald-faced deception, look Will in the eye and spin a tale neither of them believes? Will glances at the darkness beyond the window and hates it. He hates being helpless; Alana's house is miles away, and Will doesn't have a car, or even a bike- and the woods are too dangerous to go out in anyways. His home has always been his sanctuary, but now-

He's waiting for Hannibal. He's failed Alana for the last time; it's almost a relief. 

At least he doesn't have to worry about Hannibal killing everything he loves. Not any more. He stabs his fingers into his closed eyes, warding off the tears that threaten to spill over. 

Alana can't be dead. She's almost certainly dead. Hannibal has probably killed her, and Will is sitting in the dark with no way to reach them. _For want of a nail,_ he thinks, but it feels a little like Hannibal has sabotaged every horseshoe he owns, and called it protection. 

_Alana is dead_ , Will thinks, and for the first time he resents the darkness outside, and the long and winding road that separates them. 

The fire pops in the grate and the dogs shift and snuffle on the floor. Nothing could be further from the restrained opulence of Hannibal's house, Will thinks, letting his gaze drift over the living room, but Hannibal seems happy here. He giggles, suddenly, at the image of Hannibal as a backwoods cannibal, a cliché from a horror movie. 

At least they're not on the menu, and at least Hannibal is the scariest monster in the woods. 

Elegance isn't a prerequisite for cannibalism, of course, or even monstrosity, but Hannibal's special brand of terror had hung on how graceful he was, how civilized he was. He had been almost like a monster from a Gothic novel, all old-world mystery and ageless elegance. He was, Will thinks, about two steps shy of being a parody of himself. And he had gone to Alana's house, and she had called- _for help_ \- 

Will shakes his head and circles around his own thoughts, forcing them down. He has to _live_ with Hannibal. He has to live, anyways. He doubts Hannibal would give him any other options.

When the headlights appear on the road, Will knocks back the rest of his whiskey, slopping it down his chin. It leaves a trail of stinging heat on his skin. The truck speeds down the driveway, headlights bouncing as it dips in and out of potholes. It screeches to a halt a few yards from the front porch. The dogs raise their heads in sleepy inquiry, and Will puts his book down and goes out to meet Hannibal. The driver's side door slams, urgently, and Will squints into the blinding glare of the headlights, and braces himself.

It's too soon. Hannibal shouldn't have been back for another day, at the very least. The things that could have inspired his haste are all horrifying to contemplate: they've been overrun by zombies, by murderers (well, it would be appropriate, at least), by flood or fire, or disease- something bigger than the everyday hells they've lived through so far. Hannibal's feet are light on the ground, tapping out a staccato rhythm as he runs. 

Will raises a hand, shading his eyes, and sees slender shoulders, the dip and cut of a feminine waistline, the curve of a hip-

"Will!" Alana gasps. She slams into him at top speed, voice hoarse and crackling in her throat. He closes his arms around her automatically, mind going blank.

"You're alive," she says, face buried in his shoulder. She's solid and warm under his hands, body expanding with each breath she takes. The cloth of her coat is rough and reassuringly grimy to the touch. Her hair ghosts over his skin, cool in the night air.

Something in his chest clenches, hard, and then dissipates. He breathes out and feels the pressure in his chest subside for the first time in a long time.

Hannibal found her. Will tips his head up to the stars, silently thankful, and tightens his arms around Alana.

Her words are muffled by his shirt. "Oh God, Will. You're alive."

Will squints at the headlights again, trying to see inside the truck, but the windshield is dark. Alana pulls back to trail her fingers down the side of his face, assessing him.

"We have to go," she says. Her eyes are wide and dark, and her hair is falling in loose waves around her face. Will blinks at her.

"Where's Hannibal?" he asks.

"Dead," Alana says. Her tone is curt, and the hand that's on Will's chest fists in his t-shirt. The whole world comes to a shuddering halt.

"We have to go," she says again, her voice quavering. Her eyes are very wide. His gaze is drawn to her lips even as he tries to understand what she's saying.

"Dead?" Will repeats. Hannibal can't be dead, he thinks, because he was alive just this morning. He had tuned the piano last night. He wasn't-

He tries to parse her words, fingers digging into the steps beneath him. His ears aren't ringing, not quite, but the world takes on a strange unreal quality. The ground beneath his feet has fallen away, Will thinks.

He looks over at the car again, expecting Hannibal to be standing beside it, to be laughing at him, and the truth of Alana's words hits him like a physical blow. Will sits down, hard. The wood of the porch is rough against his bare legs, and he taps it absently, mind spinning.

"I shot him," Alana says. Her arms are hanging by her sides, and her brow is wrinkled with concern, and something else- she drops into a crouch in front of him, avoids his gaze without seeming awkward.

"He tried to kill me," Alana says to the space beside Will's left ear. "So I shot him. Five bullets, center mass. Just like you showed me."

Shooting bottles off of fence posts had been something they'd done together, in another life. He can remember how she'd been pressed against him, torn between giggles and studious calm, how small her hands had felt in his as he helped her to aim his gun. She had smelled of chypre, orange and caraway mingling with the sharp scent of her shampoo when he pressed his chin into the crown of her head.

Will looks at his hands. His knuckles are still split from where they'd connected with Hannibal's jaw.

"Will," Alana says, firmly, "we need to go. You need to get the dogs and come with me." She reaches out to touch his face again.

"Listen," she says. "I know this is your- your home- but it's not safe here. You're all alone. Please come with me?" Her thumb strokes down the side of his jaw, gentle. Her skin is rough where it had been soft before; he wonders how she's been living, how she's changed in this brave new world of theirs. 

"You're alive," he says, stupidly. He can't swallow around the lump that's appeared in his throat.

Hannibal is dead.

He had always known there was a chance of this happening, but somehow it had seemed remote in Hannibal's case. He wasn't like the rest of the world. He hadn't been human enough to die. Will touches his mouth and feels the scabs on his knuckles pull and sting, and thinks: Hannibal had walked out the door and into his grave.

"I'm alive," Alana says. She dashes tears out of her eyes and tries to smile at him. "We're both alive, and I'm sorry I didn't come sooner," she says.

"Abigail is here," Will says. She blinks at him once, and her smile twists oddly.

"Of course she is," Alana says.

"No, really," Will says. He catches her hands in his own, and lets her pull him up. "She's upstairs." He gives her the best smile he can manage, knowing that it's probably a horror-show grimace, and leads her inside of the house.

"What happened?" he asks, holding the door open for her. She ducks her head and reaches out for the dogs, stalling.

"He came to kill me, Will," she says, looking at the dogs. "I don't know what you thought you had- what he thought you had- but whatever it was," she says, scratching Winston's ears with fierce concentration, "it didn't include me." She glances up at him, a flash of blue through the curtain of her hair, and goes back to the dogs.

+

 

He knows that she's telling the truth. There's no other way to make sense of the phone call that had rattled him earlier; there had been two people in her house, and he had _known_ \- had known, viscerally, that only one would walk away. 

He's relieved that it's Alana, and it makes him want to vomit. Glenlivet tickles the back of his throat and Will can see it in his mind's eye, playing out in perfect detail:

Alana would have been alone, by chance or design; whatever safety net she had constructed for herself in the aftermath of the virus had slipped her grasp, for the moment, or she had slipped it. The end result was the same: she was home alone when a monster came calling, looking for flesh to eat.

Had she noticed when he arrived? Or had he taken her by surprise, crept in through a window and taken off his shoes?

Hannibal respected her. Perhaps he had knocked on the door, asked to be let in.

He looks at Alana again, watches as she greets the yelping dogs. Looks at her with an investigator's eye. She's wearing clean clothes, but there's a hole in the knee of her jeans, and a lump under her shirt that's probably a bandage. There's a livid bruise on her neck, just under her jaw. He would have expected her to die. His victims were usually obliging. Will certainly had been.

A hand had grasped her by the throat, maybe lifted her off of her feet. And then she had found her gun, one arm clutching at her killer, the other flailing for a weapon- and then-

-muzzle to chest, five bullets. Hard landing, but she was alive. Will rubs his thumb against his index finger, tracing up and down. Her hands were probably stained with gunshot residue.

Will shakes his head, focuses on the present, forces Hannibal's face out of his mind. He finds himself grasping for something- something just beyond his reach. He's looking for ghosts.

Alana is putting leashes on the dogs.

"We're going now?" he says.

"Yes," Alana snaps. "I'm tired, Will. I'm so tired of scraping a living out here, when anyone can-" her breath hitches.

Will reaches out for her.

"We need to go," she says, letting him pull her into another hug. "I hear that Boston is... isn't too bad," she continues, voice muffled against his chest. "It's safer," she says. "There's food. There's police."

"Okay," Will says. He rubs her back, leans down to smell her hair (woodsmoke, snow, blood). The truck is waiting outside, headlights still beaming into the house.

Abigail's door opens upstairs and he hears her coming out on to the landing, wood creaking under her bare feet. She's wearing her bedclothes and her arm is in a sling. Pyewacket clatters down in her wake.

"See?" he says, to Alana, "I told you she was alive." Alana turns her head, still pressed against his chest, and he feels her breath catch again.

"Abigail-" she says.

"Hi," Abigail says. She stutters a little, as if she knows what's happened without having to ask, and her nose is red.

"Abigail-" Alana says again. Her eyes are wet and her face is pale. "Oh my god."

Will wonders, not for the first time, just how close she and Hannibal were. Alana slips out of his arms and walks over to where Abigail is standing on the stairs. Her hands are shaking a little bit, he notices.

"Come on," Alana says, her voice rough as she reaches out to Abigail, "we're going." When she turns to look back at Will, her eyes are bright and her cheeks are ruddy, and something about her makes Will think of an avenging angel, burning bright and sweeping his old life into ashes and dust. She killed Hannibal (his mind stutters over that-), and now she's taking him in hand, and, he hopes, everything that comes with him. Will closes his eyes for a moment. Hannibal had certainly brought her back into his life- perhaps just not in the way he had intended.

What would Hannibal have wanted from her? What had he expected?

He leaves Alana and Abigail to their reunion, and opens the first cupboard he comes to. He finds a bottle of wine and canned dog food, stacked three deep. The wine had been Hannibal's. He trails a finger over the peeling label and tries to untangle the confused knot of emotions that Hannibal's death has brought up.

He's not ready, he thinks. He wasn't ready for Hannibal to be out of his life, to be free. To be alone.

Will wishes he had a knife. One clean slice and Hannibal would be out of his mind forever.

He stifles a sudden sob and presses his hand to his eyes. It feels wrong to be crying over Hannibal Lecter, somehow. When he finally trusts himself to turn around, Abigail is red-eyed, too. She gives him a watery smile and goes back upstairs, Pyewacket trailing behind her.

"Will?" Alana says. She touches his shoulder, deliberately. Grounding him.

"I'm going to help Abigail pack," she says. Will nods and starts taking down the dog food, for lack of anything better to do. He'll have to pack up his clothes, and find a way to get the dogs into the truck. He can tether their leashes to the sides of the truck, put down some blankets to keep them warm. It's not ideal but he suspects the EPA will be slow to track him down.

They'll have to get the dogs into the city. He slams the cupboard shut, leaving the wine. They'll cross that bridge when they come to it.

Right now, he needs to find a bag for the food and decide if he's keeping any of Hannibal's clothes.

Will turns back to the cupboard and pulls out the wine. It can't hurt to have a drink. 

 

Alana, moving in a whirlwind of fury and righteousness and fear, has them packed up and ready to go within the hour. She climbs into the truck on the drivers' side while Will coaxes the last dogs into the back, her fingers drumming nonstop on the steering wheel. Before- before everything had gone to hell, Alana had always been still, and strong, and quiet, a pillar of strength for Will to lean on. She had been his lodestar, even as she ceded ground to Hannibal.

Now, though, all of that stillness had been shattered. She been edgy and twitchy since she bolted out of the truck, lights on, doors open, and she hasn't paused for a single breath. She watches as Will helps Abigail into the middle seat of the truck, careful of her arm, and starts the ignition almost before Will has closed his door.

Abigail's head drops onto his shoulder again, and he thinks she's crying. He pretends not to notice.

Will barely has a moment to take in his house, all the windows black, the doors locked, before it disappears behind them. There are no faces in his windows, and the graves in the yard are faint humps of earth, still rising high out of the ground. The swelling ground and waving grass makes the house look all the more like a ship. A shipwreck, perhaps. 

Hannibal is dead, Will thinks. His hand clenches on the door handle. 

Alana guns the accelerator, and Will catches one last hazy glimpse of his home when he turns to check on the dogs. He can't see them, not really, but they had huddled together in the blankets he'd put down for them earlier, and they seem safe enough.

"I'm sorry," Alana says, as the house recedes into darkness behind them.

He finds Alana's hand in the darkness, strokes her index finger with his thumb, and imagines he can feel the grit of gunpowder on her skin.

"Me, too," Will says.

He takes her hand and watches the road roll under their headlights, mile upon mile upon mile, towards the rising sun.


End file.
